We’re Roger and Viki — the Rambling Roos. The name was inspired by the mascot of our alma mater, Austin College (the kangaroo), and the fact that for many years we had a Roo logo on the side of our Bounders, both before and into our early years of full-time life. These days we drive a Beaver Contessa, which, true to its name, has a beaver on it instead. The Roos name stuck anyway.

We started RVing together back in 1998, long before we ever thought about doing it full-time. That idea sat in the background for years — something we’d get to “someday.” Someday showed up in 2019: our youngest had just graduated college, Viki retired, and we sold the house. We spent months deciding what we actually needed to keep (not much, it turned out) and pulled out of the driveway in a 2001 Bounder.

It didn’t take long to learn the Bounder wasn’t built for full-time living, no matter how hard we tried to make it fit. A few months in, we started shopping, and by early 2020 we’d traded up to the Beaver Contessa — just in time, as it turned out, for two long-planned trips (we went to Hawaii, and Viki traveled with her father to Africa) to collide with the start of the pandemic. We parked near family for a while and waited it out.

Since then, we’ve put a lot of country behind us — crisscrossing the U.S. more than once, east and west, with a few bucket-list trips mixed in along the way. We keep finding our way back to a handful of places that stuck, the Oregon coast, and the mid-Atlantic region chief among them. We’re still out here, still full-time, years into a life we once only talked about doing “for a year, maybe.”

This blog, however, hasn’t kept up. We wrote fairly regularly for a few years and then let it sit, mostly untouched, for a long stretch. This post is us picking it back up — a relaunch, not just a continuation. Most of what’s been here will probably come down or move into an archive, and at some point we may add a few retrospective posts to fill in the stretch between where the old ones left off and where we are now. Going forward, though, the plan is simpler: keep writing, more regularly, about wherever we happen to be.

Welcome back. We’re glad you’re here.